Wanted: Chief Ignorance Officer

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Executive Summary

Reprint: F0311D

Ignorance management is arguably a more important skill than knowledge management. Mastering nescience requires learning four basic principles.

In recent years, the chief knowledge officer has found a home in the executive suite as companies have come to realize that often their single most important asset is their intellectual capital. The time may be ripe, though, for the CKO to be joined by the “CIO”—a manager not of information but of ignorance.

Little attention has been paid to ignorance as a precious resource. Unlike knowledge, which is infinitely reusable, ignorance is a one-shot deal: Once it has been displaced by knowledge, it can be hard to get back. And after it’s gone, we are more apt to follow well-worn paths to find answers than to exert our sense of what we don’t know in order to probe new options. Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation. Solved problems tend to stay solved—sometimes disastrously so.

Unlike knowledge, which is infinitely reusable, ignorance is a one-shot deal: Once it’s gone, it can be hard to get back.

Most of us will cheerfully acknowledge our ignorance about plenty of things. But few of us would dare to cultivate a healthy ignorance, or nescience, within our own fields of endeavor, where we often take pride in what we purport to know. (The word “nescience,” which simply means a lack of knowledge or awareness, may be a more fitting term for us to use, as it does not carry the pejorative connotations of “ignorance.”)

Many eminent thinkers have commented on the tyranny of knowledge. The management literature talks about unlearning standard ways of doing business and gleefully trots out examples of spectacularly wrong predictions by renowned scientists and business leaders whose pronouncements were narrowly based on accepted intelligence. That doesn’t mean we’re better off being ignorant, but recognizing the value of nescience may help us manage better. Indeed, the job of the astute “nescience manager” is to steer attention away from the known to terra incognita. Four principles emphasizing nescience over knowledge can guide this exploration.

The Principle of Deferment.

Nescience is fruitful when managers want new ideas. Yet the impulse is always to fill the vacuum with ready knowledge, which makes us feel that at least we’re getting somewhere. The trick is to delay this thrust into knowledge, to shelter nescience as long as possible. Even a hypothesis can be the beginning of the end of nescience. Once the options are on the table, or the two-by-two matrix has been drawn, thinking becomes bounded. Indeed, the exploration of nescience often happens, if at all, only where all the known avenues are unattractive. Take the case of a high-cost manufacturer of paper products that was facing an array of unpalatable alternatives. Instead of reflexively analyzing the standard change options (modernizing equipment, selling out, shutting down), executives at the company kept an open mind. This allowed them to tune in a weak signal emerging from one anomalously profitable customer—a signal that ultimately led the company to a new strategy based on making highly specialized paper products. This new approach turned the plant’s outdated, high-cost equipment into a source of advantage. By acknowledging their nescience, the executives interrupted their natural slide into conventional business analysis.

The Principle of Prematurity.

This is a necessary counterpart to the first principle: Managing nescience means abandoning the idea that you must have complete knowledge before you can act. Adopting the new strategy meant that the paper company’s executives had to implement revolutionary process changes whose consequences they could not predict for sure. The fog of uncertainty around these changes was ultimately pierced only by the executives’ action. Every leap that nescience managers take will inevitably seem premature, but critical learning very often comes from adjusting to unforeseen circumstances that no planning could presuppose.

The Principle of Irrelevance.

New knowledge comes from old knowledge—but only when familiar ideas are allowed to intersect and interact in unexpected ways. This fruitful recombination often happens through metaphor and analogy, and it depends on the liberty to explore the seemingly irrelevant. We cannot know ahead of time what will serve as inspiration. Canon’s disposable aluminum copier drum, which revolutionized the personal-copier market, was inspired by a beer can. The skilled nescience manager must create the conditions for happy infection by the irrelevant. The unexpected vantage point can help induce a beneficial nescience that disarms us of existing tools and systems of thinking.

The Principle of Waste.

The wastefulness of nature is truly staggering. Of the billions of seeds scattered, only a few grow to maturity. Similarly, the only way to get a good idea is to get lots of them, even to let them proliferate independently and compete for primacy. Such redundancy is expensive but can be crucial to innovation. Credit card issuer Capital One conducts thousands of structured experiments each year to identify profitable new products and segments, knowing that most will turn out to be duds. A few hits, however, can quickly become vast new opportunities. Nescience managers are prepared to accept false starts and dead ends.

These principles spring from the fundamental recognition that our stock of knowledge is dwarfed by the vast expanse of our ignorance. It is easy to forget this truth when our focus is on managing existing knowledge. But to constrain our horizons to the current state of awareness is to destroy the possibility of unexpected novelty. The foremost quality of the nescience manager is a determined humility. It requires a certain kind of wisdom and courage to say, “I don’t know” and to see this void as an asset and an opportunity rather than as a deficiency. Paying attention to nescience can remind us that if we want knowledge that is worth managing, we have to create it first.

A version of this article appeared in the November 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.

David Gray is a member of the Boston Consulting Group’s Strategy Institute in Boston and the director of the firm’s Strategy Gallery.